1. Field
One or more embodiments of the present invention relate to a pharmaceutical composition for preventing or treating cognitive impairment-related diseases and a method of preventing or treating cognitive impairment-related diseases by using the pharmaceutical composition.
2. Description of the Related Art
Dementia comprehensively encompass complex clinical symptoms from which a normally developed brain is impaired or destroyed by external factors such as trauma, diseases, or genetic factors, which leads to abnormal deterioration of overall cognitive functions and higher metal processes, such as language, learning, and intelligence. Dementia may be largely divided into dementia by Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia, dementia by specific neural diseases, and systematic disease, etc. according to the cause of disease, and the dementia by Alzheimer's disease is responsible for 50% or more of them. Dementia by Alzheimer's disease progresses due to an accumulation of a β-amyloid protein that causes the dementia, into an oligomer form, fibril form, and then into a plaque form, during which process the brain including neuron cells are damaged.
Treatments that have been developed so far were based on the fact that a level of acetylcholine in the brain of an Alzheimer's disease dementia patient is lower than that of a normal person and thus, the treatments were developed to increase the level of acetylcholine in the brain or increase the activity of cholinergic neuron cells. Acetylcholine esterase is an enzyme that hydrolyzes acetylcholine into choline and acetate and thus, an acetylcholine esterase inhibitor is used as a treatment for Alzheimer's disease dementia. The dementia treatment may be donepezil (product name: ARICEPT), rivastigmin (product name: EXELON), and galantamine (product name: REMINYL). However, these drugs are not used to fundamentally treat the disease, but to relieve memory impairment. The drugs also showed side-effects during clinical trials and effects of the drugs decrease when they are used for a long period of time.
Meanwhile, a pharmaceutical composition including EPPS for preventing or treating diseases related to β-amyloid accumulation was disclosed in a research paper. In the research paper, N-(2-hydroxyethyl)piperazine-N′-(3-propane-sulfonic acid) (EPPS) inhibits the accumulation of β-amyloid fibrils or oligomers and decomposes the accumulated β-amyloid fibrils or oligomers to inhibit toxicity caused by the β-amyloid.
Accordingly, to effectively prevent and treat dementia, a drug that inhibits the accumulation of β-amyloid, which is a primary factor for dementia, and physiologically increases the amount of acetylcholine in the brain is needed.